Offline install of Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012
A lot of SharePoint 2013 developer environments do not have access to internet, therefor it is hard to install the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. When you download the Office Developer Tools from the MSDN website, you only get the small Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WPI) software that will then download the actual files from internet.
Fortunately, there is a little known feature of the WPI …. Offline mode! It gives you the possibility to download the tools, and then install them on any SharePoint 2013 Environment that you need using a simple command.
The Process is divided in two steps: The first step is to actually download all the files, and the second step is to install them on a virtual machine! For the first step, you will obviously need an internet connection, however you can do it on any machine!
Downloading the Office Developer Tools Package
The first thing you need to do is go to the MSDN Website here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apps/fp123627.aspx and download the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 package.
Once it’s downloaded, open PowerShell and run the following command:
WebpiCmd.exe /offline /products:OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW /Path:C:\Temp\OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW
(you can change the path with whatever you want! It will automatically create the folder)
It will download a bunch of files and will put them into folders pretty cleanly! Also, by default, the WebPlatForm Installer commands are not installed, and if you don’t have an internet connection, you might get a nasty error! So what we will do is download the WebPi binaries from here: http://www.iis.net/learn/install/web-platform-installer/web-platform-installer-v4-command-line-webpicmdexe-rtw-release (Direct Download: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/0/4/704CEB4C-9F42-4962-A2B0-5C84B0682C7A/WebPlatformInstaller_amd64_en-US.msi )
You can now move this folder on a network share, or copy it on your offline environment. From now on, you won’t need an Internet Connection Anymore!
Installing Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012
After copying the “OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW” on your offline environment run the following command to install it: (Make sure to change the path to actually represent the real path you’ve chosen)
C:\SharePoint\Software\OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW\WebPlatformInstaller_amd64_en-US.msi /q Start-Sleep -s 120 C:\SharePoint\Software\OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW\bin\WebpiCmd.exe /install /products:OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW /XML:C:\SharePoint\Software\OfficeToolsForVS2012RTW\feeds\latest\webproductlist.xml /AcceptEula
Once everything finishes installing, it will look something like this:
Note: This tutorial was done and tested with version 4.6 of the Web Platform Installer. If you ever have errors with an older version, please tell me and I will update the article!
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